Passaic man serving life in prison for helping in robbery may be released

PASSAIC — A Passaic County man serving a life term in prison for helping rob a pool hall nearly 15 years ago could be freed because of the trial judge’s error in the instructions to jurors.

In a decision issued Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Henry Adamson should be either released or retried.

The court gave the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office, which tried the case, "a reasonable period of time" to decide whether to retry Adamson, who has been in prison since October 1998. The court typically gives prosecutors six months to decide on a course of action.

Chief Assistant Passaic County Prosecutor Steven Braun said his office has not yet decided what it will do. He said options include asking the full 3rd Circuit to reconsider the ruling or to petition to U.S. Supreme Court to take up the matter.

"We disagree with the 3rd Circuit opinion," Braun said. "It’s just a matter of what we decide to do."

Adamson, now 45, was convicted June 25, 1998, of conspiracy to commit armed robbery, five counts of armed robbery, five counts of aggravated assault and seven weapons offenses. He was sentenced to life in prison and to serve 25 years of the term before eligible for parole.

During his three-day trial, Adamson insisted detectives lied in testifying he had admitted to robbing Brother’s Candy Store in Passaic on Dec. 14, 1996. In an attempt to question Adamson’s credibility, prosecutors used the written statements by two of his accomplices who incriminated Adamson to try to convince jurors he was lying.

In Adamson’s civil rights appeal, his attorney, Assistant Deputy Public Defender Lon Taylor, argued the trial judge should have told jurors they could use the accomplices’ incriminating statements only to determine whether Adamson was lying, not to determine whether he was guilty. Without that special instruction, Taylor insisted, there was no way to know what role the statements played in the jurors’ verdict.

The federal appellate panel agreed, saying it would be natural for jurors to use those statements in deciding guilt unless they are told otherwise.

"We have serious concerns that the verdict was substantially influenced by the constitutional error," Judge Kent Jordan wrote for the panel.

Public Defender Yvonne Smith Segars, whose office is representing Adamson, said the decision illustrates the importance of a defendant’s right to confront witnesses.

"The federal court ruled that these co-defendant statements can only be used to impeach the defendant’s credibility regarding his claim his confession was a fabrication," she said in a prepared statement. "The right to confrontation is so ingrained in our justice system that this is the only outcome that could have occurred."